The Good Heart

Paul Dano seems about as homeless as Cindy McCain, and yet there he is in the opening shots of "The Good Heart," living in a box and eating cat food straight out of the can. He doesn't have a plate. The poor man doesn't even own a fork! And do you think he treats himself to Fancy Feast? I seriously doubt it.

"The Good Heart" is not intended to be realistic. It is a fable of a variety and style distinctly European, and watching it I thought for sure that I was seeing a remake of a foreign film, one that died in the translation from its culture to ours. The film has a whimsy about it that, to most American eyes, will read as tonal imprecision covered over by unearned sentimentality. Little is ever at stake. Most of the narrative is static. Similar scenes are offered up over and over. But you get the feeling that you're supposed to feel something - and that the filmmaker cared.

Watch the trailer for the movie "The Good Heart."

Media: San Francisco Chronicle

Turns out this is no remake but an original film, from the Icelandic writer-director Dagur Kari. It's about two men who end up changing each other for the better. Lucas (Paul Dano) is a sacred fool who can't function in the world. In the hospital, recovering from a suicide attempt, he meets Jacques (Brian Cox), the owner of a squalid bar. He brings Lucas home to be his heir and resolves to teach him about life and the bar business.

Needless to say, the bar is like no bar that could ever exist in the middle of New York City, but then, this is a fable, so that's not important. What's important is that the bar within the movie is nothing you'd want to be stuck inside, not even mentally, as a viewer. It's dark and dingy and has the same half dozen customers every night, none of them recognizably human, all of them whimsical constructions meant to evoke our amused sympathy at the human condition. It's all tiresome, not funny, not moving, not interesting.

Dano can play a sweet spirit, and Cox has some nice moments as a lifelong curmudgeon who'd like to change his patterns and temperament but can't seem to find the strength. The spooky young French actress Isild Le Besco ("A Tout de Suite") makes a welcome appearance as a ... well, as a girl who makes a welcome appearance. She's an abstraction, like all the other characters in this labored fable.

It's a strange thing, this type of whimsy. Kari offers us ideas in place of characters, and yet he expects us to see through these ideas to the real-life conditions they represent - and then to respond to them in kind. This is not a ridiculous expectation. It just doesn't seem to work, or at least this is not how 999 out of 1,000 Americans watch movies. But this film may find a more receptive audience overseas.